This November London’s burgeoning art community will open its doors to the public, enabling art lovers and anyone with a passion for crafts and design to experience the works of over 200 SFSA members.

The biannual Open Studio at Second Floor Studios & Arts (SFSA) is an integral part of their yearly programming and commitments to community engagement, giving Londoners the chance to meet its community of more than 200 professional arts and crafts practitioners in their creative spaces; to discuss, view and buy their work. The Open Studio will be open to the public on Thursday 15th (5pm – 9pm), Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th (11am – 6pm) November

A stone’s throw from the Thames Barrier, SFSA is an affordable studio provision and creative space championing the practice of art, crafts and design in London. It is an arts community in the truest sense. Four years into a five year plan, once complete SFSA will provide affordable arts space, studios and facilities for more than 300 artists. The development currently houses more than 200 artists and crafts makers from the fields of painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, digital design, animation, illustration, fashion and jewellery design, mosaic, glass-making, cabinet-making and interactive sound installation.

The Thames Barrier Print Studio (TBPS) at SFSA, one of London’s most spacious professionally equipped open access fine art printmaking studios, will be open with a series of print technique demonstrations throughout the weekend. TBPS will also be celebrating the art of print at its very, very best with its inaugural exhibition of studio members works in the no format gallery on site entitled ‘Freedom Of The Press’

SFSA’s recently open river fronted arts café CANTEEN will be serving scrumptious homemade food and beverages throughout the Open Studios weekend.

All studios are self-contained with good natural light and range from 150-1500sqft, and start at £154 pcm. SFSA contributes to the Affordable Studios sector and is a member of the National Federation of Artists’ Studio Providers.

The response of painters to the challenge posed by photography is evident in the changes which occurred from the late 19th Century onwards in the way paintings were used to record recognisably human figures. Photographs of apparently moving human figures became source material for artists like Edgar Degas who used them to endow the human figures in their figurative objective artworks with naturalistic forms and apparent movements. Dissatisfaction with the attempts of photographers like Eadweard Muybridge to adequately record the trajectories of moving figures led Étienne Jules Marey to invent different types of chronophotographic camera for this purpose. Chronophotographic attempts to visualise previously invisible phenomena led early 20th Century visual artists like the Italian Futurists to base their attempt to use artworks to achieve the same goal both on Henri Bergson’s ‘cinematographical’ theory of visual perception and aesthetics; and on the use of synaesthetic (sensory perceptual) analogies and pseudo-synaesthetic (extra-perceptual linguistic metaphorical) analogies between sensible forms in different modes of perception to record their multisensory perceptions in visual artworks. Like these Italian Futurist artists, Sally McKay seeks to immerse spectators in the multisensory perceptions of moving human figures recorded in her visual artworks.

The early 20th Century eurythmic dance theorists Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Jean d’Udine argued that seeing ‘morphocinetic’ arabesque lines caused a spectator’s ‘muscular sense’ to arouse resonations in different modes of this spectator’s perception. This muscular sense governed the synaesthetic ‘art of gesture’ used by visual artists to orchestrate and identify the physiological rhythms of their bodies with the physical rhythms of music, painting and sculpture; and in particular by dancers to visibly express their invisible ideas, emotions and feelings. A spectator’s endowment of morphocinetic arabesque lines with a muscular sense also aroused this spectator’s visual perception of such ‘muscular’ lines as a ‘living symphony’ of human movement. Dalcroze and Udine’s ideas inspired the semi-abstract paintings of moving human figures by artists like Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia. McKay’s envisaging of her multisensory perceptions of moving human figures as lines, colours and shadows in her artworks relies both on visual memory-images abstracted from her visual sensations, and on body memory-images abstracted from muscular sensations of her body movements. McKay uses such body memory-images to coordinate her multisensory perceptual making of artworks during collaborative events where moving human figures may experience a loss both of personal subjectivity, and of the distinction of their bodies from the ‘living’ atmospheres of light and sound in which they are immersed.

Hilanda is a Spatial Private Detective. She looks for clues embedded in the fleeting aesthetic experiences of city life. Hilanda’s work involves strolling about and getting lost in the city’s maze. If she was in Paris she would be a flaneuse, but since she operates in London she is a detective. When in rapture and delirium instead of playing the violin she spins filaments and threads.

At night, Hilanda spins the city’s fabric along with dreams into clues. These clues often unravel, detect or trace back the outlines of personal stories and culprits.

The Foreigners’ Collective have been invited to create a dance performance in the no format space using their unique cross cultural collaborations. The collective will also be holding open rehearsals so that the members of SFSA and TBPS can also engage with their artistic process.

The Foreigners’ Collective will be in residency from the 9th July and performances will take place the weekend of the 14th and 15th of July.

The Foreigners’ Collective

From a small group of independent strangers in a strange land bearing the common denominators of dancing, creating and co-existing, The Foreigners’ Collective was born. In addition to their art, this international group realized a deep notion of fraternity from their shared investigation and experience of what it means to be a ‘foreigner’ and has strengthened their bond and confirmed their desire to reconvene in order to create.

Resting on the surface is the actuality of being an alien; an outsider in a country, culture, or society that you do not identify with. Yet no less can one be a foreigner not geographically, but philosophically when deviating from the norms of which one is expected to abide by. Foreigners may wander physically or emotionally; sometimes aimlessly, yet other times seeking to join or form an alliance. The Foreigners’ Collective is an alliance; a dynamic amalgam seeking to collaborate with foreigners and encourage diverse cultural exchange.

Traditional oil painting techniques and subject matter underpin these paintings by Scottish painter Deborah Cumming, but recent work reveals a new approach to both landscape and still life.

Landscape has emerged as Gridscape, combining two contrasting styles which have had a profound influence on the artists career: traditional landscape painting and rigid colour grids used in design. The landscape painting sits behind a number of painted squares that have been selected from a grid structure, mapped out before painting begins in colours which provide both sympathy and contrast. The resulting painting offers a mix of traditional and contemporary styles that compete for the viewer’s attention.

Still life, while retaining static observations of composition, form, colour, light and mood, has been simplified, offering a new representation of an old theme. Influenced by the work of mid 17th century Spanish artists Zurbarán and Cotán who simplified the concept of still life by depicting everyday objects, in an uncluttered setting, devoid of religious symbolism or moral sub-context, this work attempts to present still life in a new way. These contemporary paintings involve three basic elements: a dark background, an everyday object and a piece of fabric. The main object is either flora or fauna at varying stages of growth placed simply on carefully considered fabric. The light source is important in all of these works, as is the composition and placement of the object.

“Deborah’s grid landscape paintings force the viewer to switch between two opposing styles within a single painting. The grids provide a strong design element to an otherwise traditional landscape painting. Her still life paintings are simple, uncluttered examples of beauty and artistic craftsmanship” – Matthew Wood, SFSA Director

Deborah Cumming: Landscape painting as a fusion of artistic subjectivity and visible objectivity

Text by Stephen Baycroft

The painted image of a figurative objective painting relies on the spatial depth of an artificial geometrical perspective to impose the same apparent objectivity onto the coloured forms of the figurative objects in this image as the coloured forms of the figurative objects located outside this image in the visible world of someone observing this painting. Western aesthetics has included attempts to endow the visible lines and colours in figurative objective paintings with the functions of mimetic illustrative representation and/or non-mimetic non-illustrative linguistic expression.

The capacity of the lines and colours in a painting to function as mimetic illustrative representations of the apparently objective coloured forms of figurative objects located outside this painting, benefited from empirical scientific research into coloured pigments by Michel Eugene Chevreul and coloured lights by Ogdon Rood.

The capacity of the lines and colours in a painting to function as non-mimetic non-illustrative linguistic expressions of apparently subjective things like an artist’s emotions, feelings and ideas, was legitimised by modern empirical scientific, philosophical and occult scientific research into the subjective properties of colour. Such colour research has involved theoretical and practical attempts to develop universal languages of colours whose systematic organization has included the use of abstract grids of coloured squares. Many figurative objective and abstract painters have tried to invent and use universal languages of objective colours to make paintings using colours which they believed had the linguistic capacity to express their subjective emotions, feelings and ideas.

Cumming uses the space envisaged by the painted surface of one of her landscape paintings to juxtapose the coloured forms occupying the perspectival space of the representational (i.e. figurative objective) areas of this painting, with the abstract grid of coloured squares occupying the non-perspectival space of the expressive (i.e. abstract) areas of this painting. The painted surface of such a landscape painting can be conceived to be the visible means by which Cumming tries to abolish the distinction between the abstract thought-formal content of her own subjectivity and the figurative objective content of the visible world represented in this painting.

“The title derives its name from a throwaway gag in the Will Ferrell movie ‘Blades of Glory’. It’s an absurd title, reflecting the ridiculous subjects of the drawings. Unfortunately in the last few years, too many of my friends have passed away – life can sometimes seem very bleak and sad. This body of work is an attempt to step away from that darkness – into a world of unbridled joy and stupidity.” – David Bray

David Bray’s compelling works come from a lifetime love of drawing and an active imagination. Using basic working tools, such as pens, pencils and paper bought from ordinary stationary shops, Bray creates intricate, time-consuming drawings, which explore emotion, utopia and a world of fantasy.

Born in Dartford, Kent, in 1970, as a child Bray would apparently draw images of space travel, where he would depict himself and his friends visiting other Planets and Universes. As he grew older he began to explore a dark, egotistical fantasy world, which is still apparent in the work he makes today being influenced and inspired by a wide range of artists: from Allen Jones, Eric Stanton, to erotic photography by Helmut Newton and Araki. Bray has exhibited worlwide – having shown in London, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Portland, Los Angeles and Perth. As well as an exhibiting artist, Bray has had a successful career as a commercial illustrator since graduating in Graphic Design from Central Saint Martins in 1992.

Clients have included: Absolut, Puma, Agent Provocateur, VW, Vodafone, MTV, Nokia, The New York Times, GQ and more. His collaboration with photographer Tim Bret Day on the Harvey Nichols advertising campaign ‘HN on Earth’ is now in the permanent poster collection at the Louvre. Bray has recently resurrected his design practice: clients including Virgin Atlantic and Terence Conran.

His show at no format sees Bray working on large scale portraiture, with overiding themes of loss, voodoo, religion and sadness……

The second exhibition in the cycle of exhibitions at the no format gallery on the themes of sublimity and synaesthesia is devoted to the work of the painter Laurent Cahard. The ‘germinative’ artistic process developed by Cahard involves his use of an ‘atmosphere’ of graphic ideas, emotions and feelings aroused within himself to mentally abstract a set of line and colour elements from the visible world, that he envisages as the set of configurations of elements of a ‘motif’ in a computer-generated sketch. Cahard then uses the processes of addition, removal and rotation of these elements to arrive at the final version of this sketched motif that functions as the starting point for the compositional process by which he paints a new version of this motif on the gridwork of canvas units of a painting. The elements of this painted motif have qualities of texture and colour that are absent from the sketched motif from which it is derived, thereby preventing this sketched motif from being an ‘original’ of this painted motif. The composition of the elements of a motif in a painting by Cahard is based both on pseudo-synaesthetic analogies with music, and on linguistic analogies that endow these elements with the status of a non-grammatical language analogous to music. Pseudo-synaesthetic musical analogies permit Cahard to break with the classical rules of composition associated with the making of mimetic illustrational paintings in which figurative objects occupy a pictorial space whose depth relies on artificial geometrical perspective. Like painters such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, Cahard suppresses the spatial depth of artificial geometrical perspective in a painting in order to envisage a flattened tapestry-like pictorial space within which an observer can see melodic, harmonic and vibratory rhythmic tensions of motif elements. The ‘musical’ qualities of these painted elements deprives them of the representational function of mimetic illustration, while permitting such elements to possess the expressive function of linguistic signification of the motive attributes of the atmosphere of ideas, emotions and feelings used by Cahard to envisage the motif in the sketch from which this painting is derived. The theoretically unlimited nature of the germinative process by which Cahard actualises the potential variation of a motif, parallels the processes by which human potential is continually becoming actualised in contemporary human life.

The 2012 exhibition programme for the ‘no-format’ gallery will include a series of exhibitions of visual artworks under the collective title ‘On Sublimity and Synaesthesia’. These exhibitions will explore art created in response to experience at the sublime limits of ordinary vision, and how the limits between the physical senses can be transcended by synaesthetic processes in the brain which enable non-visual data to contribute to the creation, experience and knowledge of visual artworks. Each exhibition in this series will give one in-house artist the opportunity to exhibit a selection of his/her visual artworks, and to work in conjunction with the freelance writer Stephen Baycroft (author of a biography of the artist Ken Currie entitled The Mask of Being, 2001, and currently completing a book on the relationships between the art of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, the American poet T.S. Eliot and the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon), to produce an artistic statement in which this artist places his/her work in the context of Western art history and philosophical aesthetics.

SFSA:

Who we are:

Second Floor Studios & Arts - [SFSA] is a London-based social enterprise company and ‘not-for-profit’ project that supports the development of visual and fine art practice and craft and designer making by providing affordable studio space to artists.

Since 1997 SFSA has offered affordable studio space to arts practioners, creating a community of artists, crafts-makers and designers that has grown year on year. The company is undertaking a major strategic growth and development plan across its Woolwich site. Working with property developers Emafyl. SFSA will deliver studio space for up to 300 artists, an education centre and outreach programmes, 2500sqft gallery, arts cafe and one of London's largest open access fine art print studios - creating one of Europe's largest centres of affordable studio space for artists, craft-makers and designers.